Free Five Days by Douglas Kennedy Page B

problem is: Maine is quiet. And underworked. And largely underpaid. Its visual pleasures – the ravishing, primary sweep of its seascape, the verdancy of its terrain, its sense of space and isolation and extremity (especially in winter) – are counterbalanced by the fact that life here throws you back on your own devices, on yourself. And David – an outwardly charming, but clearly unsettled man – was about the last thing my friend needed in her life back then. Still, between the divorce and the lost babies, and the knowledge that her dream of motherhood might be finished, David was, for a time, something of a recompense (even though I found him creepy). But I never said a word against him. Just as Lucy never made any comments about Dan. Was this wrong – a personal confederacy based on being there to hear each other out, but not to ram home certain self-evident verities? I think we trusted each other because we didn’t blitzkrieg each other with lacerating observations – because we both understood our different fragilities and were best keeping ourselves buoyed.
    But the book under discussion tonight – Richard Yates’s
The Easter Parade
– was one of those profoundly disquieting novels that hit you with the most lacerating (and unsettlingly accurate) observations about the human condition.
    â€˜I read somewhere that Richard Yates wasn’t just a serious alcoholic, but a manic depressive as well,’ Lucy said.
    â€˜Wasn’t there that well-reviewed biography of him a few years back,’ I said, ‘which talked about how, even when he was on a binge – which was most of the time – he somehow managed to grind out two hundred words a day?’
    â€˜Words were obviously a refuge for him from all of life’s harder realities.’
    â€˜Or maybe the way he tried to make sense of all the craziness he observed within himself and others. Do you know what the biography was called?
A Terrible Honesty
.’
    â€˜Well, that is, without question, the defining strength of
The Easter Parade
. It pulls no punches when it comes to examining why Sara and Emily Grimes lived such unhappy lives.’
    â€˜And the genius of the book,’ I said, ‘is that even though Emily becomes a desperate alcoholic, she’s never painted as sad or pathetic. Yet Yates also makes it so clear that the two sisters have nobody but themselves to blame for their disappointments.’
    â€˜His psychological clarity and his humanity are everywhere. As you said, we all know these women because they are, more or less, reflections of ourselves. It’s what Emily says to her niece’s husband at the end of the book, “I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.” That’s the hard truth at the center of the novel. There are no solutions when it comes to life. There’s only mess and muddle.’
    â€˜But we all want answers, don’t we?’
    â€˜You’re talking to a Unitarian,’ Lucy said. ‘We pray “to whom it may concern”.’
    â€˜And the one thing I liked most about being an Episcopalian – besides all that good Anglican choral music – was that it always preached a gospel of thinking about faith in a personal and non-doctrinal way. No real directives from on high. No Old Testament God who kicked butt if you didn’t believe he was the Man in Charge. Still, the one problem with being part of a thinking religion is that there is absolutely no certainty whatsoever.’
    â€˜Does that truly bother you?’
    â€˜Sometimes, honestly, yes, it does unsettle me – the idea that this is it, that there is nothing beyond this except mystery. God knows I’ve tried to believe in a hereafter – that is a component of Episcopalianism. But it’s always held out as more of a poetic idea – a fantasia, so to speak – than an absolute divine truth. As